Formula One

FERNANDO DELIGHTED WITH A PODIUM CONTINUES TO LEAD THE CHAMPIONSHIP BY 37 POINTS.

Felipe Massa having a great start in taking second place from Jenson Button on the opening lap settled for fourth place. The question now is did he do enough to keep his seat at Ferrari for 2013. Some will now point to Sergio Perez to be his obvious replacement. Montezemolo says not so fast and Sergio commenting on his Ferrari chances.

SERGIO PEREZ: I don’t know. I am sure not at all. I am fighting for my team and I will always fight for the team I am in, I will always give my maximum. I will always fight, if it is against Fernando Alonso or Lewis Hamilton, to give my all and every driver would do the same. It was really enjoyable one of those races where you have the pace and are the one attacking. There were very crucial moments during the race, especially with my first stint – going long and keeping pace was not easy at all. I did quite a lot of laps on those tyres and then in the second stint we managed to go on maximum attack and were able to have good fight with some drivers. I don’t think we had pace to be close to the front row or close to the top five,” he said. “We were not quick at all, lacking too much speed on the straights. I didn’t get a good lap yesterday and that is why we qualified outside the top 10. Maybe the top 10 was reachable. It helps us in a way to change strategy. I think we were one of only a few to go for primes and it worked quite well. I was worried about warm up at the beginning but it worked quite well.”

Sebastian Vettel somewhat neutral concerning the drive through penalty remains positive knowing the next few races will once again bring them back the advantage they so desperately need.

SEBASTIAN VETTEL: The drive-through incident was decided and happened, so there’s not so much to say about that. We lost some points today; but we did the best we could – you could see that our pace was not as strong as the leaders. It had been a good race for us given the lack of pace. There are not so many long straights at the next couple of circuits, so we can challenge there.”

SOME SELECTED DRIVER QUOTES FROM MONZA:

PAULDI RESTA: “Coming into this weekend I probably would have settled for eighth place, but when you consider the pace we showed in qualifying yesterday, we certainly had high hopes for the race. I struggled at the start with the heavy fuel load and didn’t really have the race pace on the medium tyres. Things improved after my stop when I was running the hard compound and our pace was much stronger towards the end of the race. But there was no way I could keep the Mercedes behind me and with their two-stop strategy they had a bit more speed than us. It’s good to extend our lead over Williams with a few more points, but obviously Sauber look strong and outperformed a lot of people. We will take the positives from the weekend, analyse things and try and improve our race pace in time for Singapore.”

NICO HUKENBERG: “It’s always frustrating to start right at the back and I knew it was going to be difficult to come through the pack – even with a quick car. I had a few good fights in the race – so from that point of view it was fun, but I was struggling with my brakes from lap one with a long pedal and I lost more performance as the race went on. Towards the end it became a safety concern so we decided to retire the car. It’s not been a particularly memorable weekend for me, but at least the team scored some points with the other car.”

Kimi Räikkönen: “It’s good to go into third position in the Drivers’ Championship but we lost some points to Fernando [Alonso] which is not ideal. It was a difficult weekend as we were too slow in a straight line, making it very difficult to hold off anyone and even with the DRS it was difficult to overtake the cars in front. We did the one stop strategy and the tyres were fine. We came into the race looking for sixth or seventh so fifth is the maximum we could have done here this weekend.”

Jérôme D’Ambrosio :“It was a pretty long and difficult race for me today. After losing my KERS on lap 6 it was always going to be tough as that’s worth about half a second per lap around here. I got a good start and was up fighting with Daniel [Ricciardo] and Nico [Rosberg], but once I lost that extra boost it was impossible to keep up and I dropped back. My last stint on the medium tyres in clean air was pretty good and I didn’t make many mistakes, so maybe with a bit more luck we could have had a slightly better result. My main aim was to finish the race and I’ve achieved that so it’s not so bad overall. It was great to be back in the car and especially with such a fantastic team ; I’ve learnt a lot this weekend.”

MARK WEBBER: “Towards the end of the race, I had no rear tyres left and I was pushing reasonably hard. Nico (Rosberg) was coming on his fresh two-stop tyres, so I had to keep pushing and staying on it – for the sake of getting a couple of points, maybe I shouldn’t have pushed as hard, but I was trying to stay on it. The rear tyres were completely finished, so I dropped it out of the Ascari chicane; I managed to keep it off the wall, but then the tyres were so heavily flat-spotted, I was worried about damaging the car. We do 330 km/h round here, I couldn’t see the track, so we decided to retire.”